It took strong leadership, carefully orchestrated staffing, alternative work strategies and efficient communication to ensure that Montecito Bank & Trust remained open to customers during Santa Barbara County’s recent twin disasters — while also guaranteeing associate safety.
Community banks are indispensable when a disaster hits, according to Laurel Sykes, chief risk officer for the 43-year-old bank, the largest locally owned community bank in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
She advised community banks located in potential disaster areas to think beyond the regulatory requirements and create strategic plans to ensure the business can support customers and employees in such emergencies.
For Montecito Bank & Trust, its incident management team is essential to quickly mobilizing critical business functions without interruption to serve customers, accommodating employee needs and planning for financial support for the community.
“When the actual incident happens, you aren’t looking at a piece of paper or document,” Sykes told Noozhawk.
“You are relying on all of the tabletop exercises or scenarios that we have faced in the past.”
Privately held Montecito Bank & Trust was co-founded in 1975 by the late Michael Towbes, and operates 12 branch offices in Santa Barbara, Goleta, Montecito, Carpinteria, Solvang, Ventura, Camarillo and Westlake Village.
In preparation for the predicted El Niño season in 2016, Sykes said MB&T implemented and tested emergency and business preparedness plans to ensure personnel and operational safety at its locations during a disaster.
The bank spent several months in 2016 improving overall disaster response strategies in case of a major disaster that could force roadways to close, and it even created an alternative work location strategy.
In January 2016, the first powerful El Niño storm led to flooding on roadways, including Highway 101 between Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. Sykes said that about a quarter of the bank’s associates commute to their work sites.
“When the road is closed, there’s nothing we can do, so we did a lot of work back in 2016,” she said. “We put together a plan for our staff that had to commute and for the associates who could work remotely.”
Two years later, the comprehensive plan in place to deal with emergencies — both for employees and for customers — was critical to ensuring customer service, providing resources to the community during and in the aftermath of the Thomas Fire and the deadly Montecito flash flooding and debris flows, and helping disaster victims with recovery efforts.
“We think about an earthquake, and not having power or being stuck in your home, but we didn’t contemplate evacuation because a house might burn down,” Sykes said.
While the bank’s service area is no stranger to wildfires, the magnitude of the 2017 Thomas Fire that scorched more than 440 square miles in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and the subsequent January debris flows in Montecito were unprecedented.
Twenty-three people were killed in the flash flooding and debris flows, and hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed. It also caused huge infrastructure damage to the Montecito area and prompted mandatory evacuation orders that stretched for weeks.
Meet. Plan. Act. Repeat.
For nearly two months, the pattern of “Meet. Plan. Act. Repeat.” became a 24-hour routine for Sykes, along with more than 20 associates who make up the bank’s incident management team, during the Thomas Fire and the Montecito catastrophe.
“Through experience, we were able to figure out what to do,” she said.
Within the first 24 hours of both the wildfire and debris flows, the bank’s incident management team gathered, declared a disaster and initiated recovery plans to address:
» Sporadic power outages
» Employee absenteeism because of school closures
» Bank branch closures
» Illness because of smoke and ash
» Alternative work locations for associates commuting from Ventura and northern Santa Barbara counties
» Regular notifications to employees and customers
Within the first 72 hours of the Thomas Fire erupting near Santa Paula on Dec. 4, 2017, 15 air purifiers were picked up at locations throughout Southern California and stationed at office sites affected by the blaze as well as bank branches. Public health officials blamed the region’s poor air quality on the clouds of ash and thick, choking smoke from the wildfire — for several weeks.
Schools were closed throughout Santa Barbara and Ventura counties during the Thomas Fire because the air was declared unhealthy, leaving families unable to work because of the lack of child care, Sykes said.
Close to Home
On Jan. 9, flows of debris and thick mud raced down Olive Mill Road, flooding the east end of Coast Village Road. The deluge poured onto Highway 101, keeping it impassable — in both directions — until Jan. 21. Montecito lost power, water, gas and Internet access. Water in most of Montecito was deemed unsafe until health officials lifted the boil-water notice for use or consumption weeks afterward.
“The boil-water was interesting to contend,” Sykes said.
The Montecito Bank & Trust branch at 1106 Coast Village Road was safely outside the damage zone, but inside the mandatory evacuation area. Even so, Montecito’s main business district remained without running water when the street closure was lifted around Jan. 23, and portable restrooms were brought in to allow the branch to reopen under a limited schedule.
During and after the wildfire, several MB&T associates commuted daily between Santa Barbara and Ventura to deliver more than 15,000 water bottles donated by a bank board member, and bank staff secured more than 1,500 N-95 masks (in partnership with Direct Relief) to offer at its branches.
In addition to social media posts on Facebook as well as website alerts, MB&T deployed daily emails to affected branch clients, providing updates to business hours and alternative locations.
“We sent out contact information bank-wide so that when employees heard from customers, they would know where to send them,” Sykes said.
In addition to MB&T’s emergency plans, the community bank uses text messaging software to communicate with employees. It is updated weekly through the human resources system.
“We always have current contact information,” Sykes said.
MB&T established an employee hotline during times when lines of communication were lost. The hotline provided a resource for information.
“It’s an incredible system to use during the disaster,” Sykes said. “Sometimes, that voicemail box was the way employees would let us know what was going on. Every night I would record a new message telling the plan for the next day and which branches would be open. The next morning, I would report who would call in.”
Personal and work emails also were used to connect with associates during the disasters.
To stay informed, bank associates attended more than 10 community recovery forums hosted by emergency officials as well as town hall meetings to ensure clients and employees had access to current information.
The bank remained open when voluntary evacuations were underway in Montecito and Carpinteria. At times, MB&T often was the only bank that remained available to residents when voluntary evacuations were declared in the affected areas.
MB&T was able to quickly staff the bank branches that had been cut off from community traffic with alternative team members as a result of the alternative work strategy designed by the bank’s chief operating officer, George Leis.
Montecito Bank & Trust also stepped up to help in the aftermath of the fire and storm-driven debris flows.
Many businesses were left with cash shortfalls and were faced with the challenge of paying bills and meeting payroll expenses. Mandatory evacuation orders forced some businesses to close their doors for weeks.
“We realized early on that some businesses that were shut down were going to have a hard time making payroll,” Sykes said.
MB&T staff mobilized a team to create a disaster assistance package, offering both personal and business lending solutions.
The branch network provided free safe-deposit boxes for storing valuables, personal emergency lines of credit, payment of deferral options on existing loans, and 24-hour turnaround on small business lines.
Montecito Bank & Trust issued 17 personal lines of credit for $120,000 to allow residents to replace supplies and personal items throughout the disasters. The community bank also issued five business lines of credit totaling $150,000, and approved 10 payment deferral requests from existing business clients, bank officials said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
